by Malla Nunn
They passed him on their way out of the churchyard in a parade of human frailty. A stumpy leg, a mouth with more gaps than teeth, a dark hollow where once had been an eye. Most disturbing of all was the combination of black skin and a physical impediment, which amounted to double punishment under the National Party laws that squeezed natives out of skilled labour and secondary schools.
Emmanuel waited for Miss Morgensen to bless the last member of her flock, a malnourished Afrikaner girl with cropped brown hair and a snub nose. The preacher held her hands, palms face down, over the girl’s bowed head. ‘You are a holy temple. May the Lord provide you shelter from the storm.’
‘Amen.’ The girl received the prayer and hurried to the street with her bony arms swinging by her side. She appeared to be running from church into the arms of the devil, which was the pattern Emmanuel had followed during his years of religious instruction.
‘This way.’ Miss Morgensen unlocked the door to a small shed nailed onto the back wall of the church. The storeroom shelves held a paltry collection of commodities that Old Mother Hubbard would have turned her nose up at. ‘I pack and distribute charity boxes on Sunday afternoon. We can talk while I work.’
She took a small wooden crate from a shelf and started to fill it from an assortment of dented cans and bulky paper bags stacked on a round table. Her movements were brisk and strong for a woman who must be in her seventies.
Emmanuel shrugged off Gerard’s jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Silk seemed a vanity in the spartan room. He lifted a box from the shelf and placed it on the table. Bergis Morgensen did not like talking to the police and, perversely, he liked her more for it.
‘One of each item?’ he said.
The missionary hesitated then thrust her chin in the direction of the meagre stockpile. ‘Three of sardines, two of spam, a bag of flour and sugar, then hand the box over to me.’
Emmanuel sorted through the cans and found the sardines and the canned meat, all with the labels peeling away from the metal. The flour and sugar bags were light, perhaps five cups inside.
‘Now.’ Miss Morgensen received the first completed box and topped it up with half a bar of soap and a washcloth that had been cut down from a towel and resewn. ‘What do you want to know about Jolly Marks?’
‘You identified the body?’
‘His mother asked me to, so I went to the morgue and signed the papers. The police have me in a few times a year, normally when they need to put a name to an unidentified body that’s been found around the Point.’ She shut the box and tied it off with string then wrote the name ‘Ephraim Nakasa’ along the side with a pencil attached to the table by a string. ‘Jolly was the first child I’ve had to identify and I pray the Lord never gives me that errand again.’
Emmanuel took down another box and arranged the cans and bags so they at least covered the bottom. ‘You knew Jolly and his family pretty well then?’
‘His attendance at Zion wasn’t regular but he came often enough to be called one of my flock.’
‘Do you know anyone who could have hurt him?’
‘Hard to say. The children in and around the docks live in a floating world. One day the tide brings in gold, the next day poison. Normal does not exist. Prostitution and violence are a part of everyday life.’
‘What about his father?’
‘In and out of jail. In and out of bars. Never in church. He’s got seven more months to serve in Durban Central Prison for holding up the local milkman for a couple of bob. That tells you all you need to know about Jolly’s father.’
‘Is there someone else in his everyday life that made you suspicious? An odd relative or a man who makes a nuisance of himself around children in this area?’
‘I’ve prayed on it. But God is stubborn and hasn’t answered me yet.’ Miss Morgensen tilted her head and frowned. ‘How did a stranger get close enough to harm Jolly? That’s the question on my mind.’
‘You think Jolly knew his killer?’
‘I believe he did.’
‘What makes you think so?’
The crime scene was cold and impersonal. The knife wound clean and precise. Murders where the people knew each other were normally messy and driven by emotion.
‘Jolly worked on the docks but he was careful,’ she said. ‘All his customers were regulars. He knew the rail yards and the quays better than the harbourmaster. It would have been hard for a stranger to surprise him.’
Emmanuel considered Miss Morgensen’s theory but wasn’t convinced. Out on the docks, a stranger with money was an instant friend. It was wishful thinking to believe that Jolly Marks worked exclusively for a select band of prostitutes and thieves. Emmanuel couldn’t throw away any leads at this point, however.
‘Nobody comes to mind?’ he said and pushed a box of supplies across the table. If the Flying Dutchman wasn’t at the passenger quay he’d need a new lead to pursue. Fast.
‘Nothing so far but God and I are working on it, Detective Sergeant.’ The missionary scribbled the name ‘Brian Hardy’ on the second charity box and ‘Bettie Dlamini’ on the third. ‘He hears every prayer and He notices every death. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from our father.” Matthew 10:29.’
If a hundred years were as nothing to God then both he and Miss Morgensen might die awaiting a divine answer to the question of who killed Jolly Marks. Man’s twenty-four hour clock was winding down and the suspect description was still ‘a white man in a black suit’ except that he could now add ‘and possibly known to Jolly’.
‘You don’t believe,’ Miss Morgensen said without rancour and began to pack the charity boxes into a wheelbarrow with a punctured tyre.
‘I’ve seen forests of sparrows fall into trenches filled with bodies,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I’m a little thin on belief.’
‘The war, eh? Infuriating, isn’t it?’ The missionary chuckled. ‘How stubborn God is? I often wonder what he’s up to with the famines and the wars and now with this poor country.’
She tied the last box with string and wrote the name ‘Delia Flowers’ along the side then placed it in the wheelbarrow. She retrieved an oak walking stick with a curved handle from the corner and laid it across the top of the charity supplies.
Flowers. Not a rare surname but not common either. The warren of decrepit cottages and cold-water flats served by Miss Morgensen’s charity was the natural nesting ground for the people the major had called ‘rootless whites’. Emmanuel was fresh out of leads and it was hours yet before he could search for the Flying Dutchman at the passenger quay. He stopped the missionary when she began to wheel her load to the door.
‘I have a car,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you on your deliveries if you like.’
‘Are you sure, Detective Sergeant?’
‘My good deed for the day.’
A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire encircled the back entrance of the red-brick industrial building. Rusted paint cans leaked colour onto the drive that led from the street to the factory. Miss Morgensen lobbed a stone across the yard and hit the back door, which opened a fraction.
‘Come,’ she called and a lopsided black man sprinted across the concrete with his nightwatchman’s coat flapping behind him. He lifted a loose section of the fence and the missionary pushed the care package into the yard. Points of sharp wire punctured the man’s hands but he appeared not to notice. ‘Ngiyabonga.’ He mumbled his thanks and ran back with the box to the shelter of the factory. The whole exchange took less than a minute. Silhouettes flittered in the doorway and then disappeared when the man reached the door.
‘He’s not alone,’ Emmanuel said.
‘You are mistaken.’ Miss Morgensen turned to the car, chin out and shoulders back. ‘He is a single man.’
She walked away quickly and Emmanuel had to extend his stride to keep up. The wariness from in the churchyard was back and he knew why.
‘I’m investigating a murder. Natives
who are in town without a proper passbook are not my concern.’ And thank god for that, he thought. The National Party’s passbook laws had come into effect after he made the jump from the foot police to the detective branch. Yes, he’d used the passbook laws to extract information from vulnerable suspects but the endless trawl for natives who had trespassed too long on white streets was never one of his duties. ‘And neither are their families,’ he added. Two or more people could have cast the flickering silhouettes in the factory doorway.
Miss Morgensen reached the Buick and rested against the hood. She studied Emmanuel’s face. He let her. A minute passed and, satisfied by whatever she saw, the missionary said, ‘The factory owner lets Ephraim stay in the storeroom with his wife and two children. She doesn’t have the passbook that allows her to work and live in the city so they have to be careful. The package helps keep the family together.’
‘So things haven’t improved in the black locations.’
‘Not enough. Men still have to leave their kin and find work in the white man’s world. And what are we without family, Detective Sergeant? We are dust in the wind.’
‘You have family in South Africa?’ Emmanuel asked. The missionary was as solid and individual as a rock.
‘My blood relations are in Norway,’ she said. ‘But my real family is here at the Zion Church. And you?’
‘My parents are dead and I don’t see my sister much any more.’
It was a lie. His father was still alive. The last time he’d seen him was twenty years earlier: standing on the front steps of the Johannesburg central courthouse, awkward in a pressed suit on loan to him for the duration of the murder trial. ‘Wave,’ his sister Olivia had whispered, desperate even at that young age to appear normal. ‘Wave goodbye.’ Emmanuel waved and his father turned his back. It was a final parting with no words. Twenty years. His father might as well be dead. His sister lived hundreds of miles away in Jo’burg.
‘It’s not good for man to be alone,’ Miss Morgensen said. ‘That goes double for you, Detective Sergeant.’
‘Double?’ She didn’t know one thing about him.
She corrected herself. ‘No. Triple. You are no more suited to being a speck of dust than I am. We were born to take up space in this world, Detective Sergeant. There’s no running from that.’
Miss Morgensen had her broken family to fuss over and protect. He had three murders to solve in a dwindling amount of time. Maybe after that, when life was less complicated, maybe then he’d think about family and just where his speck of dust would land.
‘Next stop, Mrs Flowers,’ Miss Morgensen said when they’d delivered all but the last of the charity boxes. Emmanuel parked at the edge of a wide field pockmarked with the remnants of night fires and switched off the engine.
‘We’ll have to go cross-country to deliver this one.’ She indicated a path that cut into the derelict land.
Emmanuel carried the box in the crook of his arm and followed the missionary down the narrow path. They headed for an abandoned two-storey structure set amid waist-high grass and guava trees most probably sown by bird droppings. Most of the windows in the decaying building were boarded up and the remainder appeared as black spaces punched into the bricks. The faint outline of the word ‘Soup’ ghosted across a sooty wall. Maydon Wharf, the industrial heart of the port, loomed in the background. A family of vervet monkeys trooped along the buckled roofline and clambered into the branches of an overhanging fig tree.
‘Has she been here long?’ Emmanuel asked. He felt for the handcuffs in his back pocket to make sure they were accessible. The field was open on all sides allowing escape routes in every direction. Too much ground for a single man to cover. If he flushed out Joe Flowers, he’d have to grab him and pin him down quickly.
‘She’s been here a few weeks.’ Miss Morgensen led him along the pathway with the walking stick clutched like a weapon. ‘A rent increase forced her out of her last boarding house and she’s too ill to work so she landed here. I’m hoping this situation is temporary. This isn’t the safest building. Too close to the port.’
‘Has she got family?’
‘A son, but he’s in all-male lodgings,’ came the tactful reply.
The vegetation on either side of the path was thick and the wind made a thin whistling when it blew across the wild field.
Emmanuel slowed before they entered the building and checked the area. All clear. Miss Morgensen tramped towards a buckled concrete-and-steel staircase that led to the upper level.
‘The ground floor is for the more transient types,’ she said while they climbed higher. ‘The first floor has a few rooms with doors and locks. Mrs Flowers is in one of those, thank the Lord.’
There wasn’t much to thank a higher power for in the gutted soup factory. Shoots of green vine curled through the gaps in the boarded-up windows; cracks in the ceiling admitted weak shafts of sunlight. Emmanuel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The upper floor contained a series of rooms squared around the staircase. They moved to a door at the far end of a corridor where the shadows were at their deepest. Force of habit dipped Emmanuel’s hand down to his hip to unclip his revolver and he touched the empty loop of his belt instead.
He followed Miss Morgensen into a rectangular room with four mattresses laid out on blistered linoleum tiles and stood just inside the doorway. A charred hot-water urn was bolted to the side wall where the staff morning-tea table must once have been. Three of the beds were unoccupied; the fourth was home to a faded woman with thinning brown hair. He placed the box on one of the empty beds and moved back against the wall.
The woman struggled to a sitting position and wrapped a fringed shawl around her shoulders. Her cheeks were sunk so deeply into her face that she resembled a mine collapse.
‘Mrs Flowers …’ The missionary hesitated at the foot of the mattress, her way barred by a wooden box packed with apples wrapped in purple crepe paper. A bulging sack stamped ‘Export’ leaked a pool of raw sugar onto the floor. The silver trim of a new Primus gas burner sparkled like a diamond in the dim room.
‘I forgot you were coming,’ the woman said and plucked nervously at the tassels of her shawl. ‘I was just resting.’
The box of apples and the sugar sack had come straight off the docks on the Maydon Wharf. They were common enough items to be listed missing or stolen in shipping company ledgers and then forgotten. Mrs Flowers’s new woollen shawl and the pyramid-shaped bottle of perfume on the crate next to her bedding were the kind of gifts a thoughtful son might shoplift for his ailing mother.
‘You look well.’ Miss Morgensen squeezed herself onto the end of the mattress and glanced at the new things surrounding Mrs Flowers. The Zion charity box was paltry compared with the gas burner and the boxes of candles and matches stacked along the wall.
‘I feel well,’ Mrs Flowers said. ‘I’ve got some of my strength back.’
‘That’s good news. You need to rest, and when the hospital gets its shipment of medicines I’ll bring your pills straight over.’
A whistled tune accompanied the slap of shoes on the central staircase. Mrs Flowers tried to lift her weight off the bed but her strength failed her. The whistling grew louder and Emmanuel kept out of sight.
‘Don’t fret, sister.’ Miss Morgensen patted the woman’s hand. ‘We’ll leave you in peace.’
The Norwegian missionary picked up her walking stick and straightened her skirt. Emmanuel stayed put and listened.
A tall female figure wrapped in an ankle-length mauve coat appeared in the doorway. A box of fresh tomatoes was cradled in the woman’s arms, and the chiffon veil of her jaunty straw hat shielded her face from the world. She stepped forward and flashed a broad shin. Dark hair sprouted through the nylon stocking.
Mrs Flowers whispered, ‘My boy …’
The box of tomatoes smashed to the floor and red fruit bounced across the tiles. Emmanuel grabbed for Joe but he was quick and slid through the doorway like an eel. Emmanuel caugh
t a handful of material and tugged. The coat came away in his hands and Joe ran the length of the corridor. Emmanuel sprinted and closed the gap to a body length at the top of the stairs. Joe cleared two at a time, his muscular arms flapping away from his body in an effort to gain speed. Emmanuel lunged and Joe went airborne, sailing over the last four stairs in a mighty leap that sent a cloud of ash exploding off the floor when he landed. He sprinted out of the front entrance and disappeared into the grass.
Emmanuel ran the perimeter of the crumbling building. Joe Flowers was fast despite the weight of his huge head. A woman’s leather shoe in a ridiculously large size lay at the edge of the field.
A breath came from deep in the faded greenery.
Emmanuel approached carefully and broke through the vegetation. A small man stood in a trampled circle of grass with his trousers around his ankles. An obese girl with lank blonde hair was busy removing her bloomers. They swung around, panicked at being discovered. The girl was more experienced than her customer. She slipped into the brush with her underwear bunched in her hand. The man struggled with his trousers; breath coming hard with fear now, not anticipation. A wedding ring flashed dull gold when his hands fumbled with the buttons of his fly.
‘Please, mister,’ the man mumbled. ‘I’ve never done nothing like this before. Promise.’
‘Button up your pants,’ Emmanuel said. ‘And go home.’
Miss Morgensen stood outside the abandoned soup factory clutching her walking stick in her hands like General Patton about to address the Third Army.
‘You knew,’ she said.
‘I suspected.’ Emmanuel kept an eye on the oak stick that had not once been used for walking.
‘You knew,’ she repeated with narrowed eyes and marched onto the path that led back to the car. The wide swing of her walking stick cleared the overgrown vegetation. Shredded grass seeds and greenery flew into the air. ‘You pretended charity, Detective Sergeant, but your heart was full of deceit. Mrs Flowers now thinks I led you to her son and she will never trust me again. The bond is broken.’
